Things I Miss

Of course every time you move, there's things you miss. Your favorite restaurant, your favorite grocery store (shout out to Publix...we're coming back to the south for ya one day!), the cute corner coffee shop. The kinds of things we miss here are more like any other restaurant, any other grocery store, and any other coffee shops...because we have pretty much one of everything. (Note: we actually have a few "restaurants" but they are open at weird times and on weird days so we can go ahead and say that at any given time only one or maaayyybe two is open)

Here are a few things I'm missing right now:

1. Farmer's Markets and our CSA box. In Virginia, Jim and I started getting crop shares from a local farm and picked up a box of veggies and fruit every week. In San Diego, we lived so close to the North Park farmer's market that I could walk there with my (nerdy? Maybe...) rolling cooler and pick up our weekly veggies. How cute is that?! Here, I try to go to the commissary very often to make sure I catch the produce aisle when the barge comes in (twice a week usually) but you still never know what you're going to get and where it came from. It makes dinner planning a little less planable because they don't always have what I want, but I'm getting better about working with what I can get!

2. Internet. The Internet at our house is a joke. Sometimes during the day you can get something done, but in the evenings when everyone's at home, you can pretty much forget about it. It is super slow and cuts out fairly regularly. Sending pictures and downloading small things like a song takes forever and we can't watch videos, FaceTime, or stream things like Netflix at all. There are a few places where you can go to get faster internet like the library or the coffee shop. I save up any book downloading, bill paying, online shopping I couldn't complete, and go to the library once a week or so to get some things done. Or sometimes if you start something before bed, it will be done in the morning. I think we're doing alright getting used to it, but I can't decide if it's good because we spend less time sitting around on our iPads, or bad because we spend more time since it takes longer. Either way, annoying, but not the end of the world. 

3. Specialty cheese. Back to food again real quick...cheese other than Kraft style is a hot commodity around here. Obviously there's not any fancy, fresh cheeses here, but we get pretty excited when the commissary gets things like Brie, fontina, or mozzarella which leads to cheese hoarding. All food hoarding is pretty extreme here since you never know when you might see it again, but I think cheese hoarding may be the most intense. I may or may not have a very large selection of mediocre cheese in my fridge drawer at this moment with no plans except that they had it, therefore I needed it. 

So, everyone please visit the speciality cheese aisle and farmer's market and make a cheese/fruit plate (with wine) and spend some time on your super fast internet in honor of me this weekend. 

And so we end on a positive note: something I don't miss about the states:

Not being distracted by my phone all the time. Since we don't have cell service, my phone is just for wifi, which means I don't carry it with me anywhere and it stays at home. It's nice to be connected and get texts and emails on my phone, but it's also really nice to not have everyone on their phones all the time talking or texting everywhere I go. Now when we're out with friends or each other, nobody is on their phone and we can all just be together like one big happy phone-free family (except that all the doctors have pagers and work phones and Dr. Ripple happens to get paged sort of often) but still...

And because these posts are boring without a picture, here's Jim and me kayaking this week

 

Happy Weekend!